Saturday, February 23, 2008

Here she is! Anne Boleyn, according to History's portraits, was actually not at all attractive, by today's standards. I guess personality counted for a lot back then! I wonder, however...after her decapitation, she was not well regarded, and I imagine that many portraits of her were destroyed. So then perhaps we are left with those obscure, poorly-painted, reject portraits, or possibly even portraits that were painted purposefully to make her ugly, like this one:

Our modern sense, and some popular novels by Philippa Gregory (and movie starring Natalie Portman), has made our lady Anne into a seductive, sexual entity, who seduced the King, and caused, essentially, England's break from Rome. Whether we imagine her evil, cunning, and ruthless, or frightened, powerless, and a pawn of the men of the Tudor court, she must, of course, be beautiful, and so I have tried to paint her that way. I chose the cunning and seductive version. Enjoy!

Thursday, February 21, 2008

A sudden urge to paint a portrait...to just PAINT it, and enjoy painting it, with no pressures. And it's coming out very well! I won't have time to order prints for the March 8-9 faire, but it's good to have a new portrait to add to the list, and put on the website. Anyway, here's an in-progress shot.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

I've set up an online storefront for the renaissance faire stuff, so people can go to the website and order, if we run out of stock at the faires (let's hope). It's my first time creating a shopping-cart-credit-card-safe site...or at least using Paypal's merchant services for those things, and incorporating them into a site. I have to say I'm quite pleased with myself! (now let's hope it works for really when people punch in their info.) If you'd like to see it, it's at www.laurenreeser.com/lelizabethr.

VERY special thanks to these awesome people, for commenting on my card designs and helping me make them better:

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Ok, so I fixed a lot of things, based on the great comments and critiques you guys gave me. I like it much better, though it's still not my favorite (which means it'll probably sell, lol). The new version is on the left; the old one on the right...much improved!

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Edit: So I did revisit the framing, and tightened the whole composition up. I needed the blue somewhere else besides just the feathers on the wing, so I outlined the frame with the same blue. I think it works much better now, though I will make a conserted effort with the next design (griffen) to use a different color scheme, and layout.

Here's the second card in the series of medieval animals. I'm not sure I like it! What do you guys think? The colorscheme is from source images I found of a fresco (or a manuscript page) with some lions. I don't totally dislike it, but it's not what I pictured when I started, and I feel it's too similiar to the unicorn, with the red background. I may have trouble with too-similiar color schemes, though, since paint colors were pretty limited back then...blue (indigo) and purple were expensive, and green pigments were unstable and today look black. As a result, we get ochre-terracotta-orange-black-white-and-greenish paintings from which to source and study. I may revisit this piece later...we'll see how well they do at the faires....

Thursday, February 07, 2008

So here's the first in the new series of medieval beasts. This came out better than I expected! The little flowers on the red background were really tedious...the reference tapestry pic was small and blurry in that small of detail, so I kindof just inferred it. My favorite part is the little animals hanging out in the tapestry "forest."

I guess I need to change my GCU store name now, since this isn't a bird. It's kindof a nice break, actually. The process was relatively the same, but the result SO different. I like mucho :-) I hope you like it too!

Special thanks to Mike and Keath for the words of encouragement :-). Thanks to all my other blog followers too!

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

I finally finished the bluebirds. What a nightmare in unclosed linework! Lots of erasing...which I never like to do, lol (the magic lasso is my friend). Anyway, here it is without the type...any suggestions for what kind of card this is? Mother's Day? Easter? Thankyou note? I guess it could be a lot of things...

With the next couple, I'm moving in a different direction, so I can show a bit of variety and also have some cards to sell at Faires. The celtic knotwork is challenging, but really kindof fun to create. I'm thinking there will be 3 or 4 of these, with different medieval animals -- unicorn, lion, griffen, and one other...dragon? eagle? stag?